Bee Wing & John are
in like & it’s a stair
well infat uation. John:
Look, I found
ixora, flower of giving
itself & still very
much self. Bee Wing:
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
Bee Wing: steal
away under
the table grand
fathers play
chess around, see
their knees
& know
giving, see their
feet & know very much
self. Stair
wells are angular your
eyes are round
& mid
night blue table
w/ stark square
of chess? Is both.
Repeated errors in the survey form are intentional
Mr. Mohamed lives at Mandarin
Gardens & always
is asking
for fish, folds hands &
twists
fingers,
like fish, quickly
& darting, like eyes—
five grand
children & counting, always,
like marbles.
Once marbles
clattered
on his kitchen tiles,
they are not
metaphorical,
the condominium,
however, is—— Mr.
Mohamed
several times
daily cups fish
eye fingers &
has them to float in the sink.
Marbles are not metaphorical.
They are journalistic.
Considering what is more, much more grave than in the light,
Cassandra shouts
on the roundabout, wants the head
lines five years from
now: this round
about shall be same, houses
still houses &
people, frag
ments of
mind in each
other’s mind, still——
air always this
constant thickness
of green & the rain,
predictably.
Cassandra shouts: THE
WORLD WILL
NEVER END Don’t
believe her.
From now on, every
thing will be different.
A thousand faint sounds,
breaths of wind, warmth of sun
could not
imagine fullness of
what it was, like
likeness thereof
such shaking trees & prickly grasses,
the search for a
sudden
ness
suddenly sprawling,
such opposites to the shy grass
curling
at each opportunity,
of touch,
this assertion
that demands “attention
in full, what I
am owed”
& always is
much
the quivering tree
calmed by an inch
of cow grass,
a hill, a mountain, stream
delta, isle plain——
affection this mangrove
fish, such velvet rejoicing,
that time I sobbed
into Irfan’s elbow & up here
air’s no thinner—
pebbles make the flat
difficult
pebble in the pocket
fly in the ear
The leap of the wave / whiter / each hour / greener
to my surprise,
honesty
is possible. Dryness
unbearable. little hill
in your hand, gathering sweat——
2 thoughts on “Four Poems, by Hao Guang Tse”